Of Red Files and Reasons
by SJlikeslists
Summary: They never manage to escape the Centre in their heads. (periodic additions may occur)
1. Angelo

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ does not belong to me.

There are shadows throughout the sublevels that have been left to settle in corners and behind locked doors. They remain undisturbed for year after year - some by accident and some by design. Some, of course, remain undisturbed because of the arrogance of the denizens that file in and out of the building that remains the physical manifestation of the secrets that it harbors. There are those that think that they know many things. They know far less than they think they know (and the ones that think that they know the least know far more than they realize that they do).

They think they know why he calls her daughter. They all think they know. They all think they are right. They should save their thinking for other things. None of them know. He knows sometimes. On the days that he is not drowning in a sea of everything that is not him, he can trace his way back to when it happened. It was there at the beginning of him (meaning at the end of the him that is the only floating in the ether personality that he can never seem to anchor to). It should not have been surprising to anyone paying attention that the aftermath had led to what it did, but he had never known (even on the best of days) whether or not anyone had been paying attention. He has no difficulty (even on the worst of his days) in understanding that there had not been oversight or accountability involved in the whole of the process.

He had been so empty. The emptiness was all consuming, and like most all-consuming things, it had ached. There was nothing, and there was nothing. Then, there was the wrongness of the nothing.

That had been the point. He had been scooped out to leave a vacuum (and like all vacuums that hollowness had reached out and pulled in anything and everything that could be latched onto to fill the void). She had been there - horrified and angry and so very, very afraid. It was not for him or for herself - but that this was what was coming for her little girl. Her daughter, her daughter, her daughter - her everything had been filled with that near panicked concern (and so there it stayed to this very day - the deep and abiding conviction that one must be worried about the daughter).

He knows that some days. On other days, he loses what little bit of him had shaken loose and reformed in the absence of any permanent additions to his hollow core. It gets buried under the onslaught and shoved aside by the constant presence of the stronger, louder things that are the whats and whys and hows of which other people are comprised. On those other days, he is just as clueless as all of the others. On those days, he could not even tell you that there was something that he had forgotten that he used to know.

Still, her designation as daughter remains. It was the first of all the things that tried to fill the void, and he does not need to remember the why on any given day for it to still remain where it lodged in those first hours. Years and distance, learned control and forced relinquishment of the same cannot erase that early burning in to the wasteland that once he was (still is at times). There is conviction of worry for the daughter and a desire to hide at the center of everything that has come after.

He thinks that might by why he had first retreated to the vents, but he is not sure of that (not even on some days). There is much in the way of blank inside of him; this is simply one of those places. He can tell you why he returns to the vents; he cannot say why he went there first or how he gained access or even an understanding of what a vent was.

He knows he was empty. There were people pushing into the emptiness (some directly and some faint and far removed). Then, there were the vents. He was simply there in the same way that one would say they simply breathed.

The vents are made with safety - he knows that thought is jumbled. He knows that is one of the things that will make it through the filter between his head and his mouth and be completely unrecognizable as anything that holds any sort of meaning. He does not attempt to say it. He does not attempt to say many things and still feels as though a steady stream of thoughts are always attempting to fight their way to the outside of his head. Most of those things fail to make it through the layers - less of what does still makes sense when it does. He goes to the vents because the vents have always been the place to which he goes. The vents call him because they are soothing. They are soothing because they are empty.

Distance helps.

Distance unclutters his head. Therefore, the vents help his head. The vents then are safe - the artificial kind that makes you feel rather than actually making you safer.

He knows they can find him in the vents (they have found him in the vents and forcibly removed him before). The emotions that are not his can still reach him in the vents. They are not truly safe, but it is still his safe spot. He still clings to it. He likes to be in the vents. He thinks that everyone actually has vents - they just happen to be less visible ones than his choice (even if he does not recall doing the actual choosing). He just sort of found himself in them; he just sort of stayed. He does not know if he would ever have left them of his own volition if he had not been lured out by the knowledge that daughter could worry about him and with the promise of a toy surprise.

He still finds those when he leaves his haven - even if they no longer come with the original company.

He misses the company. He has missed the company for a very long time. He knows that even on the days that he does not know that that is what it is he is knowing.


	2. Alex

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ does not belong to me.

Alex is very certain that he is the only one of them that is truly happy with his life. It is not that he does not have petty annoyances and irritations that need to be swatted surrounding him, but he has an inherent satisfaction about his life path that the others may pretend to (pun unintentional but acceptable) but do not really have within their grasp. They are all a little lost. He has clarity. He has purpose. He has enjoyments which he can (and does) savor. He has accepted the truth - the true truth about both what he is and what he is capable of doing. He is at peace with that in a way that the others are forever struggling with or against. It would be pitiable (if pity was an emotion that he bothered to cultivate).

Alex embraces the concept of sociopath because the label is something which he finds freeing. Other people might find that strange (inferior reasoning skills often lead to such false conclusions). Other people are not Alex (the poor slobs). Other people were not raised inside the walls of the Centre. That really is very sad for them - he thought upon the occasions that he bothered with the consideration of the fates of others who were not a part of _them_ at all. The facts of what the place had really been for them is often lost in the angst the others insist upon wearing around with them as if it is some sort of a fashion statement.

For everything else that the barely a dot on the map in Delaware was, it had, at least, always provided adequate stimulation for his intellect. There had even been challenges and puzzles not solved within the space of the average worker's lunch break. He missed that. He would even concede that they had a point that a Pretender let loose on an unsuspecting world was a very dangerous thing. He was the embodiment of that contention. With no external force to provide boundaries and no natural predators as it were - they were just pure brilliance left to its own devices. There were sayings about bored smart kids, and they were all true. That was what a Pretender let loose in the world was in a nutshell summary. It might be that that was the fundamental flaw in the structure of Project Prodigy. It was, in his most likely accurate opinion, a most effective method for ensuring control and therefore either intentional or a happy accident for those that had bankrolled the initial endeavors. None of them ever really stopped being children. It manifested itself in different variations in each of them, but Alex could see it so plainly that he wrote off the seeming ignorance of the others as willful blindness in an attempt to escape the reality of what they were.

Jarod was still tied to Sydney's apron strings even as he traveled from place to place desperately trying to earn the temporary friendship of those he encountered as he conducted his little playground schemes with all the earnest belief of a four year old that life was supposed to be an even field where good was rewarded and evil punished. He did it all while pointedly ignoring his own persistent existence in shades of gray. It was almost laughable in its predictableness (if good natured laughter was something in which he bothered to indulge).

There was Parker, of course, to provide a contrast to the Peter Pan incarnation. There was pretty, pretty Parker who played the game so well that she did not even know that she was playing it. It was a little difficult to gage from his level of distance, but (whether it had occurred because of early suggestions from her parents or a natural defense that had come about through instinct) he did not think that she had ever had a day where she was not in Pretender mode giving someone around her what it was they really thought they wanted.

Her instinct was to hide in plain sight because her world was about survival; his was to exploit every weakness he encountered because all he wanted was for the world around him to burn. Eddie . . . well, there had not really been an Eddie, had there? He had wandered out of the halls of the Centre and Pretended his way into whatever portrayal of what "normal" should look like that had first caught his attention and never stopped playing the role.

Alex was real at least - maybe Angelo as well. He did a lot of playing to expectations, but he also did what he wanted when he wanted in the background the vast majority of the time. Alex would pass on assessing the freak partial personality erasure or whatever it was that he had gotten courtesy of Raines (he was pretty certain that Raines did not even know what it was that he had done - the old man seldom did) for now. There was Kyle who had gotten himself killed trying to line straddle. There was Lyle . . . well, Lyle was hardly worth the trouble of attempting to analyze. He went through the motions of the sociopath without bothering to actually fully embrace it. It was almost comically disappointing to watch him in his feeble attempts. Besides, eating people? That was not an embrace of superiority and control. That was just shock value tripe to try to make himself look like something he really was not. It was a sign that he was trying too hard. The fact was that if you had to try . . . well, you just were not that good.

What a disappointing set the lot of them made.

He closed his way out of the series of windows that were tiled on the screen in front of him and allowed the information to digest as it rolled around in his head. Maybe they would do a better job with the next set.


End file.
